Today, 12 March, World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, Reporters Without Borders is releasing a Special report on Internetsurveillance, available at surveillance.rsf.org/en. It looks at the way governments are increasingly using technology that monitors online activity and intercepts electronic communication in order to arrest journalists, citizen-journalists and dissidents. Around 180 netizens worldwide are currently in prison for providing news and information online.

Further indication of the depraved nature of the West’s campaign against Syria, and the depraved nature of its institutions, methods, and faux-NGOs, vindicating a growing trend of ejecting Western “journalists” and NGO’s from an ever increasing number of nations, it is revealed that a French photographer recently killed in Syria was embedded with terrorist militants in Idlib, northern Syria, and was working on behalf of the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded “Reporters Without Borders.”

A series of recent events in Haiti have highlighted continuing threats to press freedom in a country where democratic rights are routinely denied in the interests of US imperialism and the local ruling elite.

An organization calling itself Reporters Without Borders (RWB; French: Reporters sans frontières, or RSF) has just named Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, China’s President Hu Jintao, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev and Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko to their list of Forty Worst Predators of Press Freedom for 2010. Most significant about their list of ‘bad guys’ is the geopolitical relation of those leaders and those countries to the current ‘enemies list’ of the US State Department. That is no accident, as becomes clear when we look more closely at who funds RWB.

In their declaration RWB states, “Since these predators have faces, we must know them to better denounce them. Reporters without Borders has decided to draw their portraits.” Their colourful language is no accident. The term predator conjures up images of horror in most people.

‘Set against hundreds of casualties, including many civilians, the toll of violations of press freedom during operation ‘Cast Lead’ in Gaza, might appear small. But news was another casualty of this war. The sealing off of the Gaza Strip, which was the full responsibility of the Israeli authorities, is unacceptable and disturbing. Beyond this conflict, control of news in time of war has become a military objective throughout the world. Now it has become the norm’, said, as it released its report on violations of press freedom during the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip, in January 2009.